Knowing Your Rights: Spamming, Cold Calling and Annoying Ads

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In 1982, UK Punk Band, The Clash released a song called “ Know Your Rights ”, it peaked at number 43 in the charts!


It starts “This is a public service announcement…with guitars!” and then follows that we have three rights

The three are:

  • “The right not to be killed. Murder is a crime, unless it is done by a policeman, or an aristocrat “.
  • “The right to food money, providing of course, you don’t mind a little investigation, humiliation, and, if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation”.
  • “The right to free speech (as long as you’re not dumb enough to actually try it)”.

    • I was thinking that in social media, digital marketing, call it what you will, we seem to be in the same situation as The Clash where in 1982 when they wrote this call to arms.

    Seth Godin wrote “ Permission Marketing ” and Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote the “ One to One Fieldbook ” both in 1999, some 18 years ago. The books can be summarised as; everybody is an individual and should be treated as such.

    If we rewrite those three rights:

  • Everybody has the write not to be emailed to death, there is enough data on all of us to personalise any message, unless of course it’s done by marketing automation software. Martech is after all, above the law.
  • You have the right not be interrupted by annoying ads, unless it’s done by a paid media Guru.
  • GDPR Legislation will make a massive change to the data stored for all employees but of course that doesn’t apply to sales people and anybody outside marketing

    • Things don’t seemed to have moved on from 1982 (or 1930 when it comes to the advertising gurus) as there seems to be agreement on our rights on the internet but immediately they are forgotten.

    The buyers we all are, that hate email spam, cold calls and annoying ads, when it comes to our products and services it’s legitimate tactics. After all, our product is the best in the world (so says everybody else), we are the market leader (so is everybody else) and we don’t see that we just add to the noise (so does everybody else).

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    Regardless of if you are based in Europe or Sell to people in Europe you will need to comply with GDPR and we now have data rights. This is in an attempt to equalise the balance of power between the customer and the entity collecting data, the new rights enshrined in GDPR include the following:

  • the right to be informed
  • the right of access
  • the right to rectification
  • the right to erasure
  • the right to restrict processing
  • the right to data portability
  • the right to object
  • the right not to be subject to automated decision-making including profiling

    • This means the way you collect and store data must be in line with the expectations and wishes of the people you collect it from. This could mean showing that you’ve initially collected data, what exactly you’ve collected and ultimately to deleting it at their request. Ensure that every point of data collection you’ve identified in your audit is compliant with the above list.